Metacritique

The term “metacritique” became widely known through Habermas’s use of it to refer to the study of the various forms of theory in the light of their intrinsic dependence on specific “knowledge-constitutive interests.”²⁰ Habermas distinguishes these interests from those of everyday practical affairs by their enormous generality, however, despite this they belong to the social world. They are quasi-transcendental conditions of objectivity for the spheres of knowledge they determine. The odd description, “quasi-transcendental,” refers to their character as neither ordinary social facts nor world-constituting posits of the pure ego. Habermas needs some such concept since he wants to avoid both positivism and historicism in order to affirm both the cognitive value of natural science and its rootedness in a generic interest in technical control that determines the type of object it studies.

The term “metacritique” in this sense bears a certain resemblance to the method of Lukács and Marx insofar as it crosses the usual boundaries between philosophical and social explanation. There is, however, a considerable difference between the metacritical approach in philosophy of praxis and Habermas’s metacritique. His knowledge-constitutive interests are anthropological in their generality. The (relative) truth of knowledge is conserved in contact with these interests by reason of their very generality. Reductionism is thus avoided at the cost of a loss in sociological concreteness. Marx and Lukács offer no such theory of general anthropological interests. Instead, their metacritique moves in the opposite direction, toward a domain of concreteness that they claim founds theoretical abstractions. We might better compare this approach with Whitehead’s: “I hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double one, first of harmonizing them by assigning to them their relative status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe and thereby promoting the formation of more complete schemes of thought.”²¹ In Marx and Lukács, of course, the aim of such criticism of abstractions is not to found a speculative metaphysics, but rather to achieve what might be called a sociological desublimation of the concepts of philosophy.

To some extent this difference in orientation, as compared with Habermas, may be due to the fact that the latter is primarily concerned to refute a supposedly value-free positivistic empiricism. Concepts drawn from the Kantian tradition are helpful for this purpose. In Kantian philosophy the formal properties of rationality are abstracted as completely as possible from the particular contents on which the faculty of reason exercises itself. Kant demonstrates that these formal properties, as they relate to epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, are a priori preconditions for any and all knowledge and action in the corresponding domains of real life. Each precondition responds to a distinctive value that is defining for its orientation toward reality.

By contrast, Marx and Lukács react against a Kantian cultural climate; they follow in the footsteps of Hegel in attempting to resolve the antinomies of form and content that arise from Kant’s formalistic paradigm of rationality. To Hegel they owe dialectics as the method through which the opposites can be reconciled in a higher unity, a totality. The application of the category of totality to the study of the historically given forms of rationality provides the basis for a non-reductive social theory of knowledge. Philosophy is not regarded as a mere rationalization of covert interests, nor as a passive reflection of production relations. Rather, it is the form in which the actual contradictions of social life are raised to consciousness under the horizon of the given society. The juxtaposition of the philosophical concepts with a specific social background both explains the impasses and antinomies of theory, and shows a path to resolution through social action.

Susan Buck-Morss argues that Adorno’s cultural criticism was deeply influenced by this method, as he discovered it in Lukács. She summarizes Lukács’s approach as follows:

Instead of reducing bourgeois thought to the economic conditions of its production, Lukács argued that the nature of those conditions could be found within the intellectual phenomena themselves … Once these thinkers accepted given social reality as the reality, they had to come upon a barrier of irrationality which could not be overcome (and which had led Kant to posit the thing-in-itself, because that barrier could not be removed from theory without being removed from society). Conversely, if theorists could see through the reified appearances, they would recognize that the antinomies of philosophy were due not to the inadequacies of reason, but to those of the reality in which reason tried to find itself.²²

Much the same analysis could be made of Marx’s early critique of political philosophy. Buck-Morss contrasts sociological reductionism and metacritique. But what does it mean to find “the nature of [economic] conditions … within the intellectual phenomena?” This is a crucial point that requires clarification in the case of Marx by reference to the influence of Feuerbach.

Feuerbach’s central idea is that philosophy is secularized theology. He says, “What lies in the other world for religion, lies in this world for philosophy.”²³ When philosophy identifies the subject with reason, with thinking, it brings the theological idea of “spirit” down to earth. Similarly, the concept of the object as an object-of-thought, constituted by thought or obeying rational laws, is a homely transcendental equivalent of Biblical Genesis. This appears to be a crass reduction of the essence of philosophy. What makes Feuerbach interesting is his attempt to go beyond this basic thesis toward a reconstruction of philosophy.

Feuerbach calls Hegel’s thought, which he sees as the culmination of the philosophical tradition, a “philosophy of identity.” The identity referred to is that of thought and being, reason and reality. This identity is theological and to it Feuerbach opposes what he calls “the true and absolute viewpoint”: “the viewpoint of the distinction between I and thou, subject and object.”²⁴ Yet although Feuerbach rejects the philosophy of identity, he reconstructs its formal principles on another plane.

He detaches the formal structure of philosophy from its concept of the subject and object. The “philosophy of the future,” as he calls it, will conserve these formal traits but attach them to a new subject–object concept. This is a metacritique of fundamental philosophical concepts. These concepts are relativized by reconstructing them in the concrete existential domains from which they were first abstracted.

Feuerbach first redefines the concepts of subject and object, arguing that they are both sensuous, natural things in the world which cannot be brought together merely conceptually. The identity achieved in and through thought is spurious and ideological, but there is another kind of subject–object identity which can be achieved through sense perception and love. Feuerbach writes, “The identity of subject and object, which in self-consciousness [in other words, in Hegel] is only an abstract idea, is truth and reality only in man’s sensuous perception of man.”²⁵ Thus the formal principle, subject–object identity, is taken from Hegel and conserved while its content in Hegel’s thought is rejected.

The upshot is an enlargement of the concept of the subject to include more than thinking, to include the whole human being, so to speak. This enlarged subject retains what might be called an “ontological pathos” through its continued submission to the formal principles of idealism. Feuerbach expressed his conclusion in ringing phrases that certainly influenced Marx.

The unity of thought and being has meaning and truth only when man is comprehended as the ground and subject of this unity. Only a real being recognizes real objects; only where thought is not the subject of itself but a predicate of a real being is the idea not separated from being … From this result the following categorical imperatives: Desire not to be a philosopher as distinct from a man; be nothing else than a thinking man. Do not think as a thinker, that is, with a faculty torn from the totality of the real human being and isolated for itself; think as a living and real being, as one exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the world’s oceans. Think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute monarch, as an indifferent, super-worldly God; then you can be sure that your ideas are unities of being and thought.²⁶

That is precisely Marx’s starting point in the Manuscripts. There he attempts to obey Feuerbach’s injunction by a heroic effort to overcome the gap between thought and life. As Marx puts it, “One basis for life and another for science is a priori a falsehood.”²⁷ Elsewhere in the text, Marx expresses himself in the first person in a manner that indicates his personal stake in the matter. “My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that whose living form is the real community, the social entity, although at the present day this universal consciousness is an abstraction from real life and is opposed to it as an enemy. That is why the activity of my universal consciousness as such is my theoretical existence as a social being.”²⁸

However, Marx is a better dialectician and more rigorous thinker than Feuerbach. He is not content to retain simply the general form of the philosophy of identity while giving an anthropological twist to the concepts of subject and object. He takes more than this from Hegel in order to accomplish more ambitious goals than Feuerbach’s. Marx follows Hegel in requiring that subject–object unity be grasped as the actual constitution of the object by the subject. And like Hegel he tries to avoid a Fichtean reduction of the object to the subject through a dialectical conception of their relationship. He also agrees with the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit that this relationship is established in the historical process. He accepts, in other words, what Lukács describes as “Hegel’s program: to see the absolute, the goal of his philosophy, as a result remains valid for Marxism with its very different objects of knowledge, and is even of greater concern to it, as the dialectical process is seen to be identical with the course of history.”²⁹ The formal principles Marx retains are thus richer and more complex than those that survive Feuerbach’s critical appropriation of traditional philosophy.

As Marx works out his program in the Manuscripts, it becomes clear that he is attempting not just a “reform of philosophy”—Feuerbach’s phrase—but a rigorous Aufhebung, or transcendence, of Hegelian idealism, and with it of philosophy generally. To accomplish this Marx develops a metacritique of Hegel, designed to show that the concept of reason as absolute knowledge is still a theological attempt to overcome social alienation in thought. The “ordre des raisons” must be reversed: when alienation is overcome in real life, then and only then will it be possible to overcome the alienation of reason. Thus the Manuscripts do not achieve their end in a mere philosophical reformulation of the concept of reason. Revolution becomes the basis for a new constellation, overcoming the opposition of thought and life, thinker and society, by founding reason practically in life and community. The retention of the formal structure of Hegel’s thought infused with this new content yields a philosophy of praxis.